Tag Archives: Google

Getty Images and Google are announcing an agreement for a multi-year licensing partnership, allowing Google to use Getty’s images in Search and across its other products. The agreement requires that Google make some changes to Image Search, including making copyright disclaimers more prominent and removing direct links to certain images.

The partnership comes in the sequence of a law complaint filed by Getty against Google back in April 2016, accusing Google of anti-competitive practices by promoting its own products and displaying high resolution images in Search, thereby reducing the need for users to visit the original source website.

Back in December, we made a surprising discovery: if you had Ok Google detection enabled on your Android Wear watch, it could cause a lot of lag and jittery behavior all the time. Disabling the setting completely turned the behavior around and made it so that the watch was smooth and stutter-free. I recorded a video back then to show the night and day difference and many of you chimed in reporting that disabling the detection had the same beneficial effects on your watch as well.

Every week, I examine somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred app updates while looking for changes. The most interesting things turn into APK Teardowns or Download posts. Many of the remaining updates are unremarkable, amounting to a few bug fixes, routine updates to libraries, or even just pixel-level adjustments to layouts and images. However, there are usually a few updates that land somewhere in between. I don’t want to spam readers with dozens of short posts, but I hate to ignore things that people might want to know about, so I’m going to wrap up the leftovers for a little weekend reading and call it Update Notes.

Google has been dabbling in the realm of Internet-based calling for years. First it was Gmail, then Hangouts got in on the action. While there were ways (and even third-party products) to use the Google Voice service for VoIP, it was probably the least enjoyable calling experience we’ve seen that didn’t involve MacGyver-style shorting of exposed wires to dial a number. Now an update to the Google Voice app reveals that it’s finally going to make its VoIP capabilities an official feature, and it’ll be usable directly from your phone without any hacky workarounds.

Google doesn’t pay much attention to the Google Now Launcher anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. The Google app powers this launcher, so small tweaks show up from time to time. Today, there’s a noticeable and somewhat perplexing change in the Google Now Launcher. Some users have a new home button in the search box that launches the Google Feed.

The search box in GNL is persistent at the top of the screen, but you can turn off the swipe right gesture for opening the feed.

Google Flights is a good tool for looking up flight information, and it’s about to get better thanks to machine learning. Using historical data, Google can estimate with reasonable accuracy when a flight will be delayed and by how much even before the airline knows. Google Flights is also going to begin surfacing more information about flights that come with additional restrictions.

You don’t need to do anything to get the delay predictions in Google Flights.

Three months ago Google announced the Google Clips, a tiny clip-on camera powered by some impressive machine learning technology. The idea behind it was that rather than require you to choose when to take a photo, you could trust the device to make that decision itself, so parents hoping to capture special moments with their kids don’t also have to take themselves out of the moment to do it. And today you can finally order one, though delivery dates are currently set as far out as March.

For more details, you can check out our original (slightly critical) announcement coverage, but the short version is that Google Clips is a clip-on camera that takes photos and clips on your behalf via the magic of machine learning.

Given the thousands of press releases coming out of CES, we almost missed the news that your TiVo DVR/Set-top box will soon integrate in your smart home setup, almost regardless of which platform you’ve decided to delve into.

Over the next few months, TiVo will have an IFTTT channel with multiple applets to let you automate your TV watching based on other happenings around your house, such as turn on ESPN when you get home, pause when the doorbell rings, and so on.

Google Assistant launched with just a few third-party product integrations, but the list has grown considerably since then. You can add Dish to that list soon. The satellite television provider has announced its set-top boxes will soon plug into Google Assistant on all your other devices. That means you can channel surf without touching the remote.

Dish has provided a list of sample commands that will work with its boxes once the update goes through.

Just ahead of CES proper, Schlage has announced that its immensely popular Schlage Sense Smart Deadbolt (say that five times fast) will soon work with Google Assistant. A few months back, it added support for Amazon’s Alexa, right after adding an Android app for remote control. And now, sometime in Q1 of this year, you’ll be able to ‘Hey Google’ your way into locking or unlocking your Schlage-equipped front door.